Manning taking ownership at Texas after season of adversity - ESPN

TAMPA, Fla. — Texas quarterback Arch Manning spent his offseason getting healthy, but he also added a key intangible to his game — taking ownership of leading the team.

Teammate Colin Simmons perhaps said it best: «We need a different side of Arch if we want to get somewhere. So, Arch definitely brought that side of him out, and I feel like as long as we trust and believe in Arch as a team and never look past him or look down at him, we're going to be OK.»

There is no bigger spotlight on a player than the one on Manning, whose uncles and grandfather played and starred in the NFL. After early-season struggles in his first year as a starter started to take a toll, Arch Manning decided to stop being angry with himself and start playing with nothing to lose.

That completely flipped a switch for him — and the team.

«He had never been the starter,» Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said. «A lot of us were pushing Arch to become the leader because it was his team. Arch always took the idea, 'I haven't earned it yet.' It was almost ingrained in him from his grandpa. You've got to earn everything you get. It was the whole NIL, it was the leadership, it was all these things. So ironically, it took failure. It took all this adversity that he had to go through for him to get on the other side of it.

»That's really when the team, as much as they loved him before, that's when the respect kicked in because they're like, 'That guy's mentally tough and he's physically tough to get on the other side of that and now play the way that he's playing the second half of the season. What Colin is saying is 'Give us more of that.' That's really what Arch has been doing, and they've been feeding off of him. You can feel it that this is his team."

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